I guess my point was, Windows should have just as much of a reputation, given Microsoft has shipped release builds with absolutely horrible and blatant bugs (does anyone remember windows millennium?).

I did do some research before I bought my printer and found a brother that connects to wifi and works flawlessly with both Mac and Linux. I find you can also make your life much easier as a Linux user by choosing popular distributions. It's always easy to Google specific fixes for Ubuntu.

I have an old Canon scanner that doesn't work on Windows because Canon never released a driver for anything after Windows XP. Works like a charm on Linux though.

Same experience with an old Nikon Super CoolScan negative scanner I recently bought used. It came with a Firewire PCI card. I installed the card, plugged in the scanner and it just worked.

No, printers/scanners work without the manufacturer's software; if it's supported (which, I admit, is incomplete but more than you might expect), you just plug it in, tell CUPS to add a printer (which it can do seamlessly without installing extra garbage from the manufacturer), open Simple Scan (or any other SANE frontend) and off you go.